Jan Gilbert (visual artist)

Gilbert is also an educator, curator, and activist. Gilbert has taught at both Tulane University and Loyola University; she has also previously served as a grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Gilbert has curated a number of exhibitions over her career, including the 2019 exhibition "Art of the City: Postmodern to Post-Katrina” at the Historic New Orleans Collection; the show was developed as part of New Orleans' tricentennial celebration and featured the work of seventy five artists which included Zarouhie Abdalian, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Harold Baquet, Willie Birch, Dawn DeDeaux, Douglas Bourgeois, and Rontherin Ratliff, among others. From 2012 to 2013, Gilbert served as Interim Director of Visual Art for the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in New Orleans. The following year, Gilbert received a 2013 Community Arts award from the Arts Council of New Orleans, which recognizes “artistic excellence, sustained contributions, unusual achievements, perseverance, and a deep commitment to the arts and the cultural community."

In 2012, The Front art gallery in New Orleans hosted an exhibition entitled 30 Years / 30 Blocks, which presented a partial retrospective of Gilbert's past public artworks juxtaposed with future plans for new ones.

Along with her dedication to public art installations, Gilbert's exhibitions have been noted for elements of ritual and performance, both of which became more explicit motifs in her presentations during the 1990s following numerous personal experiences with death and dying. In one instance, Gilbert honored a close friend lost to AIDS with Light in the Head (1995), a project that featured Gilbert making and burning candles while melding images of her friend into the wax over the course of eight hours on World AIDS Day. In 1999, while battling stage four breast cancer, Gilbert was inspired to create her Offerings series after a friend asked for objects to leave at the top of Mount Rainier as a "gift to the gods" for healing; Gilbert's offering consisted of a banana leaf from Jackson Square hand-stitched to create a pocket, which she then filled with locks of hair and cremated remains of loved ones.

Memory, loss, and transition are major themes throughout Gilbert's work. Gilbert's art is noted for its exploration of deeply personal subjects while simultaneously incorporating an ambiguity that one reviewer described as "mixed messages" that prompt viewers into considering their own experiences while interpreting Gilbert's work. In 1989, Gilbert debuted Beuys of Summer (also known as Goodbye, Dad), a series memorializing her late father Charlie, who played professional baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs; the title is a reference to both The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn and German artist/theorist Joseph Beuys. Gilbert also has been known to “embalm” her photographic/collage work with wax-like acrylics to emphasize the preservation of memories held in the object.

In addition to her solo work, Gilbert has been known for her frequent pursuit of collaborative projects. In 1984, Gilbert joined with fellow Tulane alumnae to form the VESTIGES Project, a New Orleans artist and writer collective focused on exploring the city's culture through image and text. In the thirty years since its inception, VESTIGES has produced a variety of exhibitions and art installations both in New Orleans and around the U.S. In 2008, the VESTIGES Project celebrated its 25-year anniversary with LOSS. RITUAL. RELIC. Residue: The Archive, a living archive installation curated by Gilbert and held at the Newcomb College Center for Research on Women; the exhibition showcased the timeline of VESTIGES, as well as artwork and methodology statements from a variety of New Orleans artists who had previously participated in VESTIGES.

After receiving her Bachelor’s Degree from University of New Orleans in 1980, Gilbert went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Tulane University in 1982.

Since the 1980s, both Gilbert's solo work and collaborative projects have exhibited both nationally and abroad, including at venues such as the New Orleans Museum of Art, Newcomb Art Museum, Rebecca Randall Bryan Gallery at Coastal Carolina University, 571 Projects in New York, Arthur Roger Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Skopje in Macedonia, among many others; her installation work has been presented in locations that have included a fire-damaged 19th century house in New Orleans, her childhood home post-Hurricane Katrina, a former Woolworth's in Tacoma, Washington, and an art route on the North Groningen coastline in the Netherlands.

Since the 1980s, Gilbert has co-contributed to “Masters of their Conditions,” an ongoing academic research and applications development project conducted by trans-cultural psychiatry scholar Dr. Jacques Arpin. The study examines cultural rituals as performance and proposes a therapy model built on performance-based techniques, with Gilbert co-assisting with research on Cajun culture as a point of reference on how communities cope with natural disasters. Both Gilbert and her husband have joined Dr. Arpin in presenting the study at international academic symposiums. Gilbert and Arpin also collaboratively presented an installation of archival assemblages of image and text from "Masters of their Conditions" research sessions as part of the 2009 TransCultural Exchange Conference's "Here, There, & Everywhere: Anticipating Art for the Future" exhibitions.

Jan Gilbert (born June 28, 1953) is an American visual artist, curator, and educator based in New Orleans. Since the 1980s, she has been known for her interdisciplinary and multi-media works that incorporate a variety of found objects. In a review of her Threshold exhibition, writer D. Eric Bookhardt wrote: “Gilbert’s exploration of an ordinary, even tawdry reality dissects not merely the images, but the mechanics of perception along with our assumptions about art, objects, and reality.”

Jan Gilbert was born in New Orleans in 1953 to Helen Basilo and Charlie Gilbert and grew up in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans. As a child, Gilbert's mother encouraged her to explore journaling with images, as well as ceramics and collages; Gilbert also learned sewing from her maternal grandmother, a trained seamstress; Gilbert credits these early skills as foundational for her development as an interdisciplinary mixed-media artist.